Monday, November 19, 2018

Ian Grant's history of NZ newspapers

(First published in The Dominion Post and on Stuff.co.nz., November 15.)

It’s odd, when the print
media are fighting for survival, to read of a time in our history when people
couldn’t get enough of newspapers.

I’ve been reading about such
a time in Ian F Grant’s new book Lasting
Impressions: The story of New Zealand’s newspapers 1840-1920.Among other things, it reveals that New
Zealand once had more newspapers per head of population than any other country
in the world.

In colonial New Zealand, newspapers
were often among the first businesses to be established as new towns arose from
the wilderness. Opportunist publishers known as “rag planters” would move
around the country, launching newspapers in embryonic communities then moving
on when better prospects beckoned elsewhere.

Early colonists, Grant
writes, regarded information and debate in newspapers as a crucial component in
working towards a self-governing, independent society. Newspapers were the glue
that held communities together and gave them a sense of identity.

The early New Plymouth settler
Charles Hursthouse expressed it in plaintive terms. “Nothing has tended to
retard the progress of the settlement more than the absence of a newspaper,” he
lamented in 1848.

Before I go any further, a
disclosure. Ian Grant was one of my employers when I worked at the National Business Review in the
mid-1970s and we see quite a bit of each other in Masterton, where he and his
wife Diane run a small but frenetically busy book publishing company.

I had a sneak preview of two chapters
in his book and was astonished at the depth and detail of the research. Grant
is the first to admit that his job was made a lot easier by Papers Past, the
National Library’s digital archive of old newspapers, but it was still a
prodigious undertaking.

His interest in the newspaper
business isn’t purely academic. A former editor of the Victoria University
student paper Salient, he was one of
a group of risk-taking young entrepreneurs who took over the floundering National Business Review in its early
days and turned it into a success story.

He later founded the New
Zealand Cartoon Archive, which grew out of his 1980 book The Unauthorised Version: A Cartoon History of New Zealand.

Grant’s background was in
advertising and it shows in his book, in which he repeatedly emphasises the
importance of the advertising dollar in sustaining the newspaper business. That
much has never changed.

He has little patience for
academic theorists who insist on ascribing political motives to the men who laid
the foundations of the New Zealand newspaper industry.

Several 19th
century newspapermen did enter politics – including the premiers John Ballance
and Julius Vogel – but the motivation for most proprietors and editors was to
make money, and the papers that survived tended to have commercial rather than
political objectives.

The one you’re reading right
now was an exception. The Dominion
was founded by wealthy farmers, merchants and professional men who opposed the
policies of Richard Seddon’s Liberal Party government. But the paper it merged
with in 2002, the Evening Post, was
more in the standard mould, having been established and owned for more than a
century by a family that had no political agenda.

Lasting Impressions confirms – not that confirmation is needed – that newspapers thrived
partly because human beings are social creatures with a natural interest in the
affairs of others.

That hasn’t changed either,
except that curiosity about the lives of others has mutated into a grotesque
form of voyeurism that finds an outlet in social (or should that be
anti-social?) media, where it’s reciprocated by people’s willingness to lay
bare the most intimate details of their lives.

A lot else has changed too, and
not necessarily for the better. The advent of the Internet has done untold
damage to the traditional media.

Many people welcome this
because it has democratised access to information. Editors in newsrooms are no
longer the gatekeepers.

But it has come at a cost.
One sad consequence is that the traditional “broad church” newspaper, which
served as unifying force of civil society by providing readers with a
smorgasbord of impartial news and information and also, crucially, by exposing
them to a diverse range of opinions, is now threatened with extinction.

In its place we have an
increasingly toxic and polarised cyberspace where people go to have their ideological
prejudices reinforced.Even the mainstream
media often seem less concerned with providing balanced news than with offering
a platform to advocacy groups intent on highlighting all the shameful ways in
which our society is supposedly failing disadvantaged minorities.

Ian Grant has now turned his
attention to the history of New Zealand newspapers since 1920, an assignment
made unusually challenging by the very fluid state of the industry. Let’s hope
Volume II doesn’t end up as an obituary.

3 comments:

I wholly agree with your 2nd to last paragraph. Unfortunately Karl, the voices of reason seem to be losing the fight. Postmodern identity politics have so deeply infected the mainstream media that the newspapers have become little more than left wing broadsheets. I already do not read anything written by certain, biased, single-issue, contributing journalists. Your articles are a terrific counter-balance to all that one-dimensional stuff.

I concur! We are witnessing the shutting down of long-time contributors in the Press, my local rag, and the replacements are often of the ilk described above..banging their 'drums', predictable & lacking historical depth or penetrating wisdom, let alone humour or some spark of originality. God it's sad.

I agree! I don't mind reading a biased report as long as some consideration is given to another point of view but so often 'reporters' today seem to write material that is shallow and seems intended to be clever when in reality it is trite and poorly thought out. Getting the Spectator provides me with a goodly amount of thought provoking materal and the internet the remainder. My wife insists on getting the NZ Herald but I seldom read it as it is so biased.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.